Philip Gould

Lord Gould of Brookwood, architect of New Labour, died on November 7th, aged 61

WHEN Philip Gould was fighting oesophageal cancer in the last three years of his life, he found different strategies to deal with it. One was to talk to other people, discussing how they coped with the pain, the fear and the night terrors. Another was to write about it in the Times, describing with searing frankness his morphine-induced hallucinations and the choking tubes in his throat. Another was to draw up a grid on which he recorded every pill he took and every session of chemotherapy. He called the cancer “Adolf”, which made him a thin, grinning, untidy Churchill. A friend once asked him how his latest scan was looking. “OK”, he replied, adding, as only an obsessive pollster could, “but all within the margin of error.”

Each of these tactics he had used before, but for a totally different purpose: to bring the Labour Party back to power in Britain after years in the post-war wilderness. In 1985 he started to talk to ordinary people about politics, discovering that many thought of Labour as “a shiver of fear in the night”, a party of the shadows; and he kept checking the pulse of the country with focus groups ever afterwards, sometimes more than once a day. He wrote too-long memos that described in shocking detail what was wrong with the party and what was needed to put it right, bouncing into Downing Street even in the years of triumph to keep the troops sharp and the “switchers” onside. And he ran five election campaigns by setting out for every day of the fight, on a grid in a “War Book”, the issues to be raised and the ads to be aired, all with the aim of keeping Labour dominant for the rest of the 20th century and well into the 21st.

This was his life's work. He seemed to have been born Labour, believing unswervingly in compassion, community and the equal worth of all men, and born too “a nutcase” about politics, planning campaigns at the age of six. Very quickly he preferred canvassing round his native Woking to studying in school, but found he was not in easy territory. Labour's heartland lay in the industrial north; the lower middle-class workers of southern, suburban Woking did not see it as their party. The unions troubled them. Talk of nationalisation or unilateralism seemed crazy. They wanted to see hard work rewarded, and scroungers punished; they wanted to feel safe, but free of the nanny state. This new electorate, the voice of late 20th-century Britain, was expertly understood by Margaret Thatcher and her advisers. Mr Gould quickly determined that, though he would not be a politician—he was always a behind-the-scenes man, losing papers and coats in the wings—he would remake the Labour Party for these people, who were just like him.

He met brick walls. His degree came late, and his accounts were always precarious until he married, at 34, Gail Rebuck, soon head of Random House. From the moment he set up his political consultancy in a spare bedroom in 1985, Peter Mandelson (later Tony Blair's spin doctor) encouraged him, but few others did.

Labour had reached its lowest post-war ebb in 1983, taking 28% of the vote. Though it now adopted Mr Gould's consumer-friendly slogans (“Putting People First”) and his new red-rose logo, the old policies remained, and the party kept losing. In both 1987 and 1992 voters still distrusted Labour on taxes and feared “the loony left”. Mr Gould could not get the notion of New Labour taken seriously until the rise of two politicians as hungry to modernise as he was, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.

He found Gordon warmer than Tony, whose intensity made him uneasy; but the eager new party leader connected with voters in a way that defied rational explanation. “How're we doing?” he would ask, constantly needing and relishing the Gould array of focus groups and non-stop polling. By 1994 this had become a formidable machine, honed by Mr Gould's observations of the Clinton campaign two years earlier. He learned then what a War Room was, as “raging” James Carville directed operations: each moment plotted, and every attack met with instant rebuttal. Mr Carville's war cry became his own: “Follow me if I advance, kill me if I retreat, avenge me if I die.” Fired up to the point of thinking and loudly talking strategy morning, noon and night, he drove New Labour to win in 1997 by a landslide, and then to win twice more.

A higher purpose

Another man might have felt satisfied. He never was, and went on living the stress-filled adviser's life much longer than was good for him. He saw that New Labour's arc was over by 2010, and that yet another permutation of the party had to appear. During its hegemony, he thought, Labour had not really articulated what its core values were or what it was for. Too busy adjusting to what voters wanted, it had not governed with a sense of higher purpose.

Interviewed near the end, in his sunny villa by Regent's Park, he felt he could apply some of those conclusions to himself. Wrapped up in dragging his party into the modern world, he had failed to measure fully the love of his wife and the forbearance of his family. He had also failed to grasp the larger point of his own life: not merely to take Labour from defeat to victory, but also to prove how powerful the human spirit could be, faced with death.